Sherrington: Baseball brings West residents together after explosion

3/11

Ian C. Bates/Staff Photographer

West High School baseball players watch as their pitcher Nick Kucera throws a pitch during a game against Robinson High School in West, Texas where a fertilizer plant exploded on April 25, 2013. (Ian C. Bates/The Dallas Morning News)

WEST — From Veterans Field on the south side of town, a mile and half from the blast site, you can’t see where the fertilizer plant used to be. But you could have felt it last Wednesday. The explosion rattled windows an hour away. A week later, the repercussions still rumble.

Even at a high school baseball game between West and Robinson, the town’s “first small step” in the healing process, as the public address announcer put it Thursday, it was hard to move on.

Fans came from all over the area to share a bond of baseball and take their minds off a tragedy that claimed 15 lives and made West an international dateline. But it was hard to keep from mixing the two storylines Thursday, and not just for the spectators.

Corey Beckam, West’s baseball coach, could tell it as soon as his players showed up.

Some were late to batting practice because they had attended a memorial service in Waco, where the President addressed the crowd. Some players didn’t arrive until the game had already started. They had good reasons. Two players, brothers, lost their house in the explosion.

Everybody here lost something.

“Are you all right?” Beckam asked his players before the game.

Clearly, Beckam said, some weren’t. They weren’t alone.

Baseball lends itself to conversation because of the pace and nature. People come to baseball games and talk about their kids, their boyfriends, their jobs, their trials and hopes and dreams. And, as 60-year-old Henry Macik said Thursday, “This is a baseball town.” West finished runner-up in the state last year in Class 3A. Scott Podsednik, a former big league All-Star, played here. They’ve got a lot to brag about here when it comes to baseball.

But Thursday around the ballpark that sits hard on the railroad tracks, the conversation was different.

Macik lives in the country, seven miles south of West, and he didn’t hear a sound last Wednesday night. A friend in Whitney, 20 miles to the northwest, told him the explosion knocked the pictures off his walls.

His sister and niece were working in flower beds when the plant went up. The force knocked them against the walls of the house and collapsed the roof. But they walked away. They were lucky. Blessed. Even with 15 deaths, 35 blocks of devastation and three of the four schools closed because of the damage, they know they were fortunate. Had it happened a few hours earlier, before school was out, the toll would have been much, much higher.

But for everyone here, it was personal. Even if you were from the next town. Jon Wood, 33, a Spanish teacher at Robinson, wore a “God Bless West” T-shirt to the game. His father was friends with two of the volunteer firefighters who died. His cousin lost a house.

“I told my students the day after it happened that it affected a lot more people than you think it does,” Wood said.

Teenagers might understand better than you’d think.

“Did y’all get any damage?” one girl asked the boy next to her on the wooden bleachers.

“Some windows and the roof.”

“Are y’all gonna stay?”

“Yes.”

They will not give up. On Monday, the first day of school since the disaster, the high school had its best turnout of the school year. And they had to go to class at Waco Connally, 10 minutes south.

Marty Crawford, West’s superintendent, came to the Central Texas town four years ago from Hillcrest, where he was the principal. A star baseball player at Baylor, he wanted to be closer to his alma mater. He also wanted to live in a town where his wife, Alanna, and his growing family wouldn’t be spread so far apart in jobs and school.

“I thought this would be a neat little place to bring our family back together,” he said.

Even with everything that’s happened, he still thinks so. You could see it in the embrace of Robinson and West players before the game, when Robinson students donated $2,500 to West’s recovery, and you could see it in a mixed team picture after West’s 7-1 loss.

Beckam was right when he sensed his team wasn’t the same. The loss was its first in district.

“It felt great to be back out there,” senior Holden Sykora said. “But it didn’t exactly feel like normal. I don’t know if it’ll ever be exactly the same again.

“But we’re gonna come out strong the next time and make it a great year.”

Beckam knows it’ll just take time.

“The best medicine for this team and for the hurt,” he said, “is to get back out on this field.”

Thursday was just a small step. They’ll be back. It’s a baseball town.

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About Kevin Sherrington

Kevin Sherrington, a general sports columnist, was born in Dallas and grew up in Houston. He has worked at five newspapers in Texas. He has worked at The Dallas Morning News since 1985. He had no idea his career would come to blogging.